Wing Design Process

ARA has over 30 years experience in the area of wing design and has participated in a number of large EU funded projects researching novel aircraft design concepts and developing new CFD design tools. ARA’s bespoke CFD tools and design process are well established for clean wings and for complex multi-element high-lift configurations. Extensive laminar flow wing design experience has been applied to both high speed jets and low speed glider wing design.

Wing section design is carried out using an ARA developed 2-dimensional screen interactive inverse design software tool, where the pressure distribution can be specified on screen with the design software providing the corresponding geometry. This tool is combined with a highly accurate viscous-inviscid transonic aerofoil code, accurate to about 1 drag count compared to wind tunnel data. An industry standard 3-dimensional version of the 2-dimensional aerofoil code is used for the 3-dimensional wing design and aerodynamic performance. 3-dimemsional SOLAR Tau RANS simulations are used for performance analysis of the design boundaries such as CLmax.

The ability to design high-lift wings has recently been developed using an ARA 2-dimensional design tool coupled to a 2-dimenisonal multi-element (slat and flap) viscous-inviscid interaction (VII) aerofoil code. Multi-slotted flap configurations using either a fowler or drop-hinge system can be designed depending on the particular requirements.